October 21, 2014 2 Comments

Everything I Know About Productivity I Learned in High School

I know I haven’t got much time so I’ll be brief.

I realize that in perhaps no more than a minute a little bell will sound from the Antisocial app on your smartphone, indicating that the app is now automatically scrambling the WiFi signal in your home, pulling down the mechanized blinds on all your windows, throwing the dead-bolts on all your doors, and sending out on your behalf a death notice to the NSA. For after all, it soon will be time for you to get back to work.

And, blast it, that’s what we writers are all about, isn’t it? Work! Sweat! Honest toil!

Indeed. We writers don’t like to waste a morsel of our allotted time on this frantically spinning orb. Up at 4:30 A.M., we swallow a shingle of toast & marmalade and then, with our preferred cup of stimulation in hand, we beaver away like prisoners making license plates until our designated fifteen minutes of recreation (spent, of course, reading blog posts on productivity).

So, knowing that you will soon need to get back to the rowing bench, I’ll just say a quick word about a new productivity strategy I’ve been employing that is working very well and that I think might help you, too.

High School Musical

It’s true. Everything I know about productivity I did learn in high school. Not the high school, however, I attended in the years of my callow youth. There, the only lessons in productivity I learned were about how to draw a cartoon of the teacher while appearing to be absorbed in Byron’s “Don Juan.” No; I’m speaking here of the high school where I now teach part-time.

It is the unswerving practice of my department chairs at school to request of me a 3-Week Calendar previewing the coming attractions (assignments, due dates, and whatnot) in each of my courses. At first, I must admit, I blanched at the request. Course planning was something one did each morning while walking from the parking lot into the school building. The last thing one wanted was to straightjacket one’s improvisatory talents by planning in advance.

But now, I must further admit, I’m hooked on the drug of the 3-Week Calendar. There’s simply nothing like waking up on a cold, dark Wednesday morning knowing that one can walk from the parking lot into the school building with a song in one’s heart, assured that the day’s strategy has been set down at HQ weeks before.

Interestingly, too, the practice of the 3-Week Calendar helps summon the Muse of creativity as I plan my courses. What makes the picture, as G.K. Chesterton once said, is the frame.

Home on the Middle Range

I can hear you scoffing.

“This is rich” (scoffs you). “You think you’re the Columbus of Productivity because you’ve learned to apply a 3-Week Calendar to your writing! But I’ll have you know, I’ve been keeping all manner of plans and schedules for years. I have a 5-Year Writing Plan, a 2014 Writing Plan, a Tornado Warning Writing Plan, and a Writing Plan for Low Biorhythm Days. I also keep both a weekly and a daily writing calendar on my laptop, my phone, and in a black Moleskine underneath my pillow.”

That slurping sound must be you sucking in your teeth with satisfaction.

But hold on, I say. Hold on one minute!

All those plans and calendars are very well. No doubt you get a lot of work done. But until you’ve unlocked the treasures of the 3-Week Calendar, I don’t think you can call yourself serious about getting things done.

What precisely are the benefits of the 3-Week Calendar?

At bottom, the 3-Week Calendar allows you to plan the middle range of your schedule. Farther out than the daily or weekly calendar, but not so far out as the monthly or annual calendar, the 3-Week Calendar charts an arc of time in which small but significant projects, or parts of projects, can get done. In three weeks a sonnet sequence can get written, a new direction established in one’s marketing efforts, or a book read and savagely reviewed–thus increasing one’s sense of accomplishment and spurring one on to even greater efforts!

(Skeptical about the significance of getting smaller projects done? Then try this blog post by Seth Godin on for size.)

The temptation for the writer is to overload the daily or weekly schedule, or to dream too big with the annual plan. But with the 3-Week Calendar, one can look over the hedge of the daily schedule but not indulge in the vain task of trying to pick out the fuzzy horizon of year’s end. One sees the bigger picture but doesn’t try to take in the entire cosmos.

The Mystical Number 3

There’s something almost magical or even mystical in the number three. I learned to crawl at three. I eat three meals per day. And Mrs. Stooge gave birth to exactly 3 Stooges.

So please, writing colleagues, give the 3-Week Calendar a try!

What are your thoughts on the 3-Week Calendar? Does it sound like a strategy that would be really useful to you?

If you have a better planning system for your writing, please share it with us.

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May 12, 2014 Leave a Comment

Slaying the Artist as Moral Monster

The artist as moral monster. Misogynist. Misanthrope. For some it’s been a serviceable paradigm. Think of Gauguin, who abandoned his wife and five children (at his exasperated wife’s request) in order to stretch his canvases, and his moral sense, under the Polynesian sun.

There were one or two drawbacks to the business plan, however. Gauguin deeply hurt those he had once held so dear and didn’t even begin to return a profit until after he was dead.

One can’t deny that the moral monster route has produced some masterpieces, but at what human cost? The Romantic artist thinks that the creative Muse demands that the artist distort his own dignity and ignore that of others. Yet the fascinating and surprising fact is that very opposite is true.

As I noted in my last post, Pixar president Ed Catmull’s lifelong study of collaborative creativity reveals that creativity flourishes best when human beings are allowed to be their most human, when their inherent dignity is attended to and they are able to exercise their powers–all their powers, intellectual, moral, physical–in ways that lead to those excellences that in saner times were called the virtues.

Seth Godin, in the Icarus Deception, confirms this point when he observes that art in our connection economy thrives when human dignity, of both artist and audience, is respected, prized, brought to fulfillment.

The way of Gauguin and Lord Byron is always available. But even leaving the moral shortcomings aside, it’s a way out of step with the way in which artists today really connect with their audiences.

Filed Under: On Creativity Tagged: , , , , ,
May 10, 2014 1 Comment

Pixar’s Ed Catmull on the Virtues of Creativity

A Review of Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull with Amy Wallace (Random House 2014)

We live in a golden age of animation, an age arguably more dazzling and innovative, more populated with great stories and lovable characters, than any other in history. And what’s remarkable is that two of the most successful animated movies in recent years, the Oscar-winning Toy Story 3, which grossed over 1 billion worldwide, and the Oscar-winningFrozen, which just surpassed Toy Story 3 to become the highest grossing animated movie of all-time, were spearheaded by two of the same people: John Lasseter, chief creative officer of both Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios, and Ed Catmull, president of both Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios.

Ed Catmull’s is a name that will be unknown to all but the most avid fans of computer animation and digital graphics. Holder of a PhD in computer science from the University of Utah, Catmull was at the forefront of the creation of the computer graphics industry in the 1970s. He eventually went to work for a unit doing computer-generated graphics for George Lucas at LucasFilm, but it was only when Lucas decided to sell that unit that Catmull’s career took the turn which eventually earned him, among many other honors, the Ub Iwerks Award for technical advancements in the art or industry of animation. For Catmull’s unit, which by 1986 included a talented young animator named John Lasseter, was bought by none other than Steve Jobs, after which Catmull and Lasseter began to pursue their dream of creating the first digitally animated feature film. Pixar Animation Studios was born. After an unprecedented string of box offices successes with which we’re all familiar, Jobs sold Pixar to Disney in 2006, after which Lasseter and Catmull established themselves as the heads of the animation studios at both entities.

In his new book, Creativity, Inc., engagingly written with journalist Amy Wallace, Catmull distills the lessons he has learned throughout his forty-year career. The book, above all, is about the art of collaborative creativity, about how to keep a business enterprise on the cutting edge of creative productivity. But the book is more than that. It’s also a history of Pixar; a detailed look into the management practices Catmull has employed to keep Disney and Pixar a double gold standard in the field of digital animation; and, especially in one of its appendixes, something of a counter-weight to the portrait of Steve Jobs found in Walter Isaacson’s authorized biography.

I found Creativity, Inc. riveting, provocative, inspiring. As someone working in the family entertainment space who, like both Catmull and Lasseter, dreamed as a kid of being a Disney animator, this is perhaps not especially surprising. But I was just as compelled by Catmull’s discussion of the management practices he has helped develop as I was hearing behind-the-scenes stories about the making of various Disney-Pixar films. And what I find so compelling in these practices is Catmull’s unflagging vigilance in identifying and rooting out all that would infect the environment needed for a collaboratively creative enterprise. From the famous Pixar Braintrust to the innovation of Notes Day, Catmull has made an art out of what keeps people at their creative best.

But here is what impressed me most about Catmull’s book, which I highly recommend to anyone involved in any kind of collaboratively creative endeavor, whether professional or not. As Catmull takes us through various management strategies designed to foster or reinvigorate creativity, what comes through is that the best creative practices are also the best human practices. That is, exercises designed to enhance creativity seem to be successful insofar as they bring out important human virtues: virtues such as trust, candor, humility, generosity, loyalty, perseverance, good humor, and respect. And this makes perfect sense, because creativity is not a discrete skill like the ability to speak French or ride a bike. Creativity is a complex expression of the very essence of human nature–one that involves the mind, will, emotions, imagination, and even certain physical attributes. Thus it stands to reason that creativity will flourish when human nature itself is allowed to flourish in virtuous activity.

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January 8, 2014 1 Comment

The New Year’s Writing Regimen

Here in the fresh, frigid air of the New Year I’m working on building up my writing muscles. The analogy to running or any other exercise regimen is exact. You begin with muscles and willpower flaccid. Stretching is required (for me, that’s “Morning Pages”). Then you plunge in. And it hurts. And there’s resistance, physical and mental. But you push through the wall. Rinse and repeat. And the more you repeat, the easier it becomes. Muscles and willpower pump up. And you begin to experience the athlete’s “high,” which energizes you further.

Another analogy I like, appropriate to the season, is that of the fire. The more logs you toss into the flames in the fireplace, the more heat you’ll generate. A log = your writing stint, the prime time of original composition. But don’t discount the value of adding kindling in the between times: the short burst, if only a minute or two, of note-taking, brainstorming, revising, doodling. Don’t let the fire die out.

You have to keep pushing yourself, too, just as in the gym. At the beginning, 500 words might seem like Everest. But you have to consistently set higher goals. Make a game of it. “500 words is my goal for today, but I’m going to try and write them in just half an hour, or 45 minutes.”

Speed is not an enemy of creativity, at least at certain stages of the process. I’m trying to write faster on the first draft. Getting the stuff down before the Internal Editor walks in, grumpy and underslept, to over-analyze and criticize every thought and sentence. Writing fast seems to keep him on the other side of the locked door. The first draft is not the time for his contributions.

The opposite advice holds, however, when it comes to the companion activity of the writer’s life: reading. In his blog post this morning Seth Godin speaks of tl;dr, internet lingo for “too long, didn’t read.” That seems to sum up my response to most of what I find online. There’s too much stuff out there, even just counting the stuff I’m interested in, and I can’t possibly get to it all. The temptation is to flit like a magpie from branch to branch, sniffing and pecking at lots of different things, but learning nothing. “Limit the inbound to what’s important,” suggests Godin, “not what’s shiny or urgent and silly.” That requires rigorous habits of selection and attention, and a kind of mortification regarding digital pap, email checking, and mindless social networking.

This is not even to mention the supreme importance of reading slowly offline. This piece by author David Mikics is a salutary reminder of that.

The photograph above is reproduced courtesy of Elizabeth Lloyd at Flickr Creative Commons under the following license.

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March 26, 2013 Leave a Comment

Your Artistic Temperament, Or, How Is It Possible You Still Have Friends?

Imagine the following:

A writer deep into the second act of his magnum opus who realizes that he hasn’t brushed his teeth in a week. Or talked to his children. Or stepped outside long enough to check the mail. Or eaten anything not made with high fructose corn syrup.

Or a writer who spends months fighting brave battles in the land of her imagination, but who immediately gets sulky and petulant when her beta-reader doesn’t get her allusion to Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida on page one of her sci-fi epic.

Remind you of anyone?

Ah, the artistic temperament! So tedious to be around–and so tedious to be around. Not that there aren’t upsides to it. I mean, without a bunch of us super-sensitive, high-strung types, the world would never have been graced with Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Slayer, Snakes on a Plane, or the Twilight series.

But seriously. The artistic temperament is indeed a beautiful thing, but it can also be a right pain in the easel. And not just for friends and family members. The same temperament that sees God in a grain of sand can also undermine one’s work in any number of ways: through discouragement, procrastination, even vanity.

The good news is that temperament of any kind is susceptible of being formed. Just as someone who by nature is melancholic can learn how to work with what is best in that temperament and reject what is destructive, so too the artistic temperament (which is often melancholic, too) can be shaped and guided and formed.

This work of formation is part of what Flannery O’Connor means when she talks about the habit of art.

So now we have to talk about how to form the artistic temperament–that’s the agenda for this week on The Daily Muse. What strategies help to capitalize on what is best in the temperament and reject the stuff that makes our best friend want to run screaming from the room?

Your help is vital in collecting and clarifying these strategies. How have you handled the difficulties and promises of your artistic temperament? What’s worked and what hasn’t?

Filed Under: On Creativity Tagged: , ,
March 19, 2013 2 Comments

Seeing Things

“Man’s ability to see is in decline. Those who nowadays concern themselves with culture and education will experience this fact again and again. We do not mean here, of course, the physiological sensitivity of the human eye. We mean the spiritual capacity to perceive the visible reality as it truly is.” –Josef Pieper, “Learning How to See Again,” in Only the Lover Sings

How well do you really see the world around you?

When after a lost half hour of email and Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest you finally tear your glance away from your computer screen–your eyes buzzing from all the electronic stimulation–and look out the window–what do you see? Do you really see what’s out there, or is the reality outside simply a screen upon which you throw the thoughts and feelings going on inside of you?

To see, as Pieper says, is more than simply accounting for the sensible details of what’s outside the window. Authentic seeing is an intellectual process by which we grasp the essential structure of reality. It is a process, too, by which we realize the special kind of intellectual being we are.

Which is why Flannery O’Connor recommended to writers, among other strategies, the practice of the visual arts. “I know a good many fiction writers who paint,” she wrote in her essay, “Writing Short Stories,” “not because they’re any good at painting, but because it helps their writing. It forces them to look at things.”

How else, asks Pieper, but by building up a habit of seeing could Tolstoy ever have written such a gorgeous simile as “The girl’s eyes were gleaming like wet currants.”

Even when we take a moment to look, our vision rarely reaches deeper than the visible surface. But the more we cultivate the habit of seeing, slowly will our vision begin to see not only the visible contours of things, but all that is there.

* Those interested in O’Connor’s own impressive drawing ability will want to check out Kelly Gerald’s book, Flannery O’Connor–The Cartoons. An excerpt of Gerald’s book published in The Paris Review, showing further samples of O’Connor’s early cartoons, can be found here.

 

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February 21, 2013 Leave a Comment

Dogma and Originality

Steve Jobs is responsible for making the thought iconic for our time:

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma–which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

That’s Jobs in his famous 2005 Stanford University commencement address. The thought is that dogma is opposed to originality. Dogma defined as being trapped by someone else’s paradigm. In The Icarus Deception, Seth Godin approvingly quotes Jeff Bezos saying much the same thing.

Okay. There’s a truth in what Jobs is saying. Creativity of whatever sort demands that we don’t slavishly attempt to reproduce the admired results of others. In terms of being human, authenticity–finding one’s own voice–is obviously a valuable concept.

But in a deeper sense, dogma and originality are not opposed. G.K. Chesterton well articulates the counter-thought to that of Jobs: “It is from the seed of dogma and from that seed alone that all the flowers of art and poetry and devotion spring.”

This may seem counter-intuitive, but think about it. Begin with the highest sense of dogma, religious dogma. There is nothing more perennial and clear than Catholic dogma, and yet there is no group of flowers more wild and various and utterly original than the lives of the saints. On the artistic level, the attempt to create a work of art without first apprenticing oneself to the masters of one’s craft and the craft’s dogmatic principles is to sow only weeds.

Originality–itself a misunderstood and overvalued concept–is the fruit of adherence to dogma.

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